Re: Oracle buys Innobase

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 03:16:22PM +0200, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2005 at 05:01:50PM -0500, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> > Though AFAIK there wouldn't be anything illegal about someone with a
> > commercial license of MySQL using the GPL'd version of InnoDB... but of
> > course if they did that they'd have GPL'd software again, so no reason
> > to pay for the commercial license of MySQL.
> >
> > This is the first time I can think of where software being GPL'd might
> > actually hurt the open-source community.
>
> Well now, that kind of depends on what you define as "hurt". If you
> were only ever interested in the GPL version, none of this makes a whit
> of difference.
>
> If all you wanted was that your code was shared and that people who
> benefitted shared also, then the GPL serves the purpose. Without the
> GPL possibly neither InnoDB or MySQL would have been open-source in the
> first place. (Maybe, maybe not. I'm not going to argue this point).
>
> OTOH, if your goal is to "share the wealth" and let everyone get good
> code for whatever purpose they want, then they would have chosen BSD
> licence. This is what PostgreSQL does.
>
> The political goals of the GPL are hardly secret. Some people might
> consider this an example of what happens if you rely on proprietary
> software models. At least we still have the code *now* (under the GPL).

Well, consider that MySQL would probably still be trying to figure out
what a subquery was if it didn't have commercial backing from it's
parent company. Hurting that parent company is going to impact the code.

Of course, this works both ways. It used to be that Linux was definately
behind FreeBSD from a technology standpoint. After companies like IBM
have poured millions into it that's no longer the case. It's certainly
possible that these companies adopted Linux over FreeBSD because it was
GPL'd.

But at least for the database market, the GPL license seems to be a
downside for MySQL. Many commercial users would rather use a non-GPL'd
database, and pay companies for support. Those companies can then give
back to the community. So whereas MySQL only has support from MySQL AB,
PostgreSQL has support from more than a half-dozen companies (some with
very big pockets).

And since most all the code in PostgreSQL is BSD licensed, I don't think
it would be possible for Oracle to 'pull the rug out from under us' as
they appear to have just done with MySQL.

Of course this is nothing but handwaving at this point. It'll be
interesting to see where things are at 6 months from now. Maybe Oracle's
going to use InnoDB as the basis for version 11! ;P
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461